Tamara Keith

Tamara Keith is a NPR White House Correspondent and co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast. During the 2016 presidential campaign she was assigned to cover Hillary Clinton.

Prior to moving into her current role in January 2014, Keith was a Congressional Correspondent who put an emphasis on covering House Republicans, the budget, taxes, and the fiscal fights that dominated at the time. She began covering Congress in August 2011.

Keith joined NPR in 2009 as a Business Reporter. In that role, she reported on topics spanning the business world from covering the debt downgrade and debt ceiling crisis to the latest in policy debates, legal issues, and technology trends. In early 2010, she was on the ground in Haiti covering the aftermath of the country's disastrous earthquake and later she covered the oil spill in the Gulf. In 2011, Keith conceived of and solely reported The Road Back To Work, a year-long series featuring the audio diaries of six people in St. Louis who began the year unemployed and searching for work.

Keith has deep roots in public radio and got her start in news by writing and voicing essays for NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday as a teenager. While in college, she launched her career at NPR Member station KQED's California Report, covering topics including agriculture and the environment. In 2004, Keith began working at NPR Member station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, where she reported on politics and the 2004 presidential campaign.

Keith then went back to California to open the state capital bureau for NPR Member station KPCC/Southern California Public Radio. In 2006, Keith returned to KQED, serving as the Sacramento-region reporter for two years.

In 2001, Keith began working on B-Side Radio, an hour-long public radio show and podcast that she co-founded, produced, hosted, edited, and distributed for nine years.

Keith earned a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree at the UCB Graduate School of Journalism. Keith is part of the Politics Monday team on the PBS NewsHour, a weekly segment rounding up the latest political news. Keith is also a member of the Bad News Babes, a media softball team that once a year competes against female members of Congress in the Congressional Women's Softball game.

President Trump has recently taken a series of what appear to be bold executive actions to reverse Obama-era policies: declining to re-certify the Iran nuclear deal, halting subsidy payments to insurance companies and setting an expiration date for the DACA immigration program. But, in so doing, he's dumping thorny problems on a GOP-controlled Congress already struggling to rack up significant legislative accomplishments.

With President Trump's announcement that he plans to nominate Kirstjen Nielsen as homeland security secretary, he still has one more Cabinet post to fill — health and human services secretary. A president having to find replacements for two Cabinet secretaries this early in an administration is unprecedented. But observers are more alarmed by the less visible vacancies at the sub-Cabinet level: hundreds of positions without a nominee, and a president who says he has no intention of filling many of the jobs.

And President Trump was here today meeting with first responders and survivors of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith is traveling with the president, and she's with us now. Hey, Tam.

If you Google interim White House communications director Hope Hicks, you'll find plenty of articles referencing her youth (she's 28), her time as a model and her work in corporate public relations for Ivanka Trump's brand.

But people who know her say if that's all you hear, you'll conjure an incomplete image of Hicks.

"They say, 'Well, Hope is so beautiful. She's a model, that's the only reason Donald Trump hired [her]' — it's not true at all," says Sam Nunberg, an adviser to President Trump from 2011 to mid-2015. "Anybody who underestimates her is making a big mistake."

The interim communications director at the White House has been notably quiet. That's by design. Hope Hicks took the job almost 10 days ago. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith has this profile.

There is one phrase Vice President Pence is almost guaranteed to deliver on his six-day trip to Latin America that begins Sunday: "The president of the United States of America, President Donald Trump, sent me here with a simple message." Pence delivers a variation on that line almost everywhere he goes from the middle of America to Asia and beyond.

Vice President Mike Pence has been offering some reassurance to Eastern European countries this week. He's wrapping up a trip to Estonia, Georgia and Montenegro, some of the countries that feel most threatened by Russia. NPR's Tamara Keith reports.

Vice President Pence is completing a trip to U.S. allies along the eastern edge of Europe. In Estonia, Georgia and Montenegro, he told local governments that Washington would support them — even after President Trump's many calls for improving ties between the U.S. and Russia.

One of President Trump's newer aides, Anthony Scaramucci, said the other day that President Trump is not going to change. So that leads to a question. How much can the newest staffer, John Kelly, really change?

Chief strategist Steve Bannon and chief of staff Reince Priebus will both make $179,700 this year for their work at the White House, but they aren't the only ones.

A new list of White House staff salaries released by the Trump administration (as required annually by Congress) reveals 22 people make the same top salary. Eighteen more earn $165,000 a year, making the Trump administration's payroll top-heavy compared to the Obama administration.

The political world has gotten used to daily tweet storms from President Trump, but a vicious attack today on two cable personalities is getting an intense reaction. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith reports.

In late May, several senators went to the floor of the Senate to talk about people in their states who are affected by the opioid crisis. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., talked about Chelsea Carter.

"She told me her drug habit began when she was 12 years old," said Capito.

President Trump kept one of his campaign promises, signing a bill Friday to make it easier for the secretary of veterans affairs to fire and discipline employees. It came in response to the 2014 VA scandal in which employees covered up long wait times while collecting bonuses.

The bill, which passed earlier this month with strong bipartisan support, also gives the secretary authority to revoke bonuses and protects whistleblowers who report wrongdoing.